When is copying music wrong? The kids aren't right

A few years ago, when a friend offered 15-year-old Evan Collins a compact disc of illegally downloaded music, Collins turned him down flat.

"Me and my parents used to download music for free," said Collins, who lives in Bloomington, Minn. "But we decided it was like stealing from musicians. So I don't take stolen music from friends, either."

But later that year, when Collins met a girl he liked, he made her a CD filled with songs by Linkin Park, the Blue Man Group and Eiffel 65. Why was his CD OK, while his friend's was verboten? Because Collins paid for his music, he said.

"I think you're allowed to make, like, two or three copies of a CD you bought and give them to friends," said Collins. "It's only once you make five copies, or copy a CD of stolen music, that it's illegal."

Breaking the law

Actually, attorneys say, copying a purchased CD for even one friend violates the federal copyright code most of the time.

But Collins' attitude -- that copying purchased CDs or DVDs is legal, while copying stolen music or movies is a crime -- is pervasive among young people between the ages of 12 and 24, according to the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll.

Among the 12-to-17-year-olds who were polled, 69 percent said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21 percent said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music for free. Similarly, 58 percent thought it was legal to copy a friend's purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19 percent thought copying was legal if the movie wasn't purchased.

Those figures are a big problem for the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, both of which have spent millions of dollars to deter copying of any kind. The music industry now considers so-called "school-yard" piracy -- copies of physical discs given to friends and classmates -- a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA.

Similarly, an MPAA representative said that in the U.S. copying and reproducing DVDs is a bigger problem than illegal downloading of movies.

"We've made substantial progress educating people that downloading copyrighted music for free is illegal," said Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman. "But we still confront a significant challenge educating kids that copying a CD for a friend is also a crime. This is a major focus for the entire industry."

Indeed, years of anti-downloading campaigns seem to be working: 80 percent of teens surveyed in the poll said downloading free music from unauthorized computer networks was a crime. Much of that might stem from highly publicized crackdowns on online music sharing. A 2004 study by The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that nearly 6 million Americans had stopped downloading unauthorized tunes because of lawsuits filed by the RIAA.

Time-honored bonding

But when it comes to stopping people from copying physical CDs, high-profile lawsuits are much less likely to occur. Prosecutors say it would be next to impossible to get one teen to testify in court that another had slipped them a copied disc at lunchtime. And besides, isn't sharing music a time-honored part of teen friendship?

"It's pretty confusing," said Collins, who was interviewed after participating in the poll.

"At my wedding I handed out about 150 mix-CDs," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at New York University and author of "Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity."

"I was freeloading on songs by Louis Armstrong and others, but I think that's why they became musicians in the first place," said Vaidhyanathan. "Music has worth because it lets us communicate in ways we can't manage on our own. But to communicate, we have to be able to share."

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Is it stealing?

Younger consumers see strong differences between copying and outright stealing.

Proportion of young people who thought the following would be committing a crime: